Social Media Tracking Tools

A social media plan should incorporate measurement through the use of social media tracking. There is not a shortage of these types of monitoring tools on the market. Some are free and others require some sort of subscription. Which you use will depend upon your goals with social media. If you are a large company looking to measure engagement across a variety of social networking sites, then the free options are just not going to work out for your social media tracking needs. For this article, we are going to focus on the tools that are free to use or, at least, have a free option.

Facebook Social Media Tracking Tools

• Facebook Insights – This is Facebook’s social media tracking tool that anyone can use to track engagement and reach on Facebook pages. The tool does not start to work until you reach 30 likes, but once that happens it provides good information on how many people you are reaching through your Facebook Pages marketing efforts.
• Google Alerts – Google Alerts is a great free resource you can use to track mentions of your brand or any search terms you need to keep track of. You can set up different alerts for the keywords you want to track and it will email you Google search finds a new page that mentions the keyword phrase.
• Mention – Mention is a great resource that has both free and paid options. It works similar to Google alerts as it scans the web looking for mention with a focus on Social Media sites. Mention is a smartphone application that comes in both Android and IPad versions so you are not tied to a desktop while using this app.
• Hootsuite – Is a social media management tool that allows you to post messages across its supported social networks. It allows you to target specific audiences with your social media promotion and streamline your process.

Twitter Social Media Tracking Tools

• BackTweets – Is a free resource that allows you to find you is talking about you on Twitter or certain hashtags. This is a useful resource for not only monitoring mentions it is also a good resource to locate potential followers.
• TweetBeep – Works like Google Alerts for Twitter. It is very useful for watching for certain keywords and hashtags that are being sent into the Twitterverse. It will notify you when certain topics are active and allow you to interject into the conversation.
• TweetDeck – Tweet Deck is a resource provide by twitter that is similar to what Hootsuite offers it just does not have as many features and it only supports twitter interaction. Its a good social media management tool for targeting twitter users.
• SocialMention – This is a real-time search engine for social media search and analysis. It allows you to search multiple networks for mentions of certain topics or keywords. This is a great free resource you can use to find out popular topics used on Social media networking sites.

Personal Social Media Tracking Tools

Facebook Graph Search, while it’s still fairly new at the time of this writing is going to become the standard tool for searching for personal mentions on Facebook. The combinations and information you can pull out of Facebook with this tool are amazing. IT has raised some privacy concerns from some users because of the vast amount of quality information you can gather, so it may be scaled back, but as of this time you can find out a lot about a person with a simple search using this tool.

Klout – Klout allows you to find key influencers in the social media arena which you may want to interact with. It also helps you to improve your reach with social media and move towards influencer status in your chosen field.